


A Departure Less Permanent

by macabre



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Angst, F/M, Terminal Illnesses
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-08
Updated: 2010-10-08
Packaged: 2017-11-08 12:34:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/443239
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/macabre/pseuds/macabre
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>AU. Sam is rescued by an angel in the woods, and he refuses to let go when her past comes knocking.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Departure Less Permanent

Sam is grateful to her; she pulls him out of the river, bandages his wounds, gives him painkillers and food, and never rushes him out of her home. Doesn’t ask what happened. Isn’t afraid of the arsenal he carries, part of which she removes off his body after she drags him home, alone, without any aid, through the woods at night.

When he wakes up, it’s to her voice singing, high and thin. It’s such a foreign sound to him that doesn’t think about his strange surroundings. She’s not singing any actual words, he thinks, or at least they’re not words he can understand, but it means more to him now than any words anyone ever said to him before.

After the first time she notices he’s awake, she introduces herself, voice musically clear: Jess. Her name is Jess, although Sam can’t retain this information until the next time he’s conscious when the pain is slowly edging off.

He learns that her laugh is as clear as a song, and that she’s artistically inclined beyond singing. She paints and takes photographs mostly; she promises she hasn’t taken any of him, but he knows she’s lying. She hardly keeps the laughing ring out of her voice.

Part of him feels guilty asking questions of her when she asks so few of him beyond his wellbeing, but Sam wonders how she keeps a house to herself in the country when she seemingly interacts with no one else and she doesn’t have any other kind of a job. She sews him up well enough and has morphine and other surprising drugs in her cabinet, although she says she’s never had any formal medical training.

He finds old medical textbooks with a man’s name printed on the inside stacked in her bedroom. Sam wonders if someone she knows gave them to her, or if she picked them up somewhere half-price. Someone read them; there are highlighted and underlined bits.

This is before he finds the store of medications she has; too many for any one person to have, let alone someone who isn’t a doctor or nurse of some kind. It’s not really any of his business – not after kicking an addiction to demon blood. He can hardly judge anyone, but it seems so far from the sweet Jess he’s learning that he can’t shake their discovery.

So he asks her about it, and she’s not angry that he’s searched through her things. She smiles at her feet, lips pressed thin, and holds her arms. They have scattered scars along the gold skin, marks that Sam has never commented on because she spent so long trying to hide them from him until he spied them on a midnight mission to the kitchen in her thin pajama top. After that she stopped covering them, and he never said a word.

He looks at them now and thinks of the empty injection needles in her bedside drawer. The scars are too large to be directly resultant, but he wonders.

“No one likes talking about their scars, Sam,” she says, eyeing through his shirt where a new one is forming, the deep cut that she helped clean, the one that infection set fire to and she sat with a hand cloth clearing away his sweat from the fever.

Her eyes move to his arm – a long, almost perfectly straight line from an old knife wound grabs her attention. She could go on skimming his body, he has so many, and she’s seen them all now. Neither of them push the subject. Sam can only be grateful to her, no matter where her scars or unclear monetary supply comes from. Everyone has a past.

It’s when Jess drags him outdoors and leads him through the woods, snapping photos of both the scenery and him that Sam thinks it’s time to go. Her smile is too open, and although she was at no point guarded around him, it breaks his heart now. He thinks she might be the most beautiful thing he’s seen – all blonde and tan from being outdoors. Her honesty and faith unshaken by the outside world. He knows her on a very fundamental level by the end of two weeks, and yet he knows not a single detail of her personal life.

It’s packing his few things back into his bag that he thinks about his family, and how he could tell their own story without feeling as connected to his father as he does to his merciful stranger. He leaves the small amount of cash he has on her kitchen table, along with the address of his P.O. box in St. Louis. He doesn’t leave his number because he’s not sure he can stand to hear her sweet voice again and know that she’s alone in the woods.

 

 

 

It’s months later when Sam has stopped thinking about her very often; that’s when his brother calls to let him know he’s got mail. A few letters from the same address, no name given. Sam hangs up and drives five more miles before turning around and heading to St. Louis.

The box has been cleared out except for the letters. Her writing is just how he imagined it would be; short and sweet and giving nothing away of herself, expecting nothing in return. He folds the letters and keeps them with old family photos.

Whenever he drives through the area, which he often finds hard not to do, Sam stops to check for mail. A few more letters come, although it evolves into less writing and more photography. They’re all of the same wilderness around her home, so Sam wonders if she ever leaves the area.

He puts them all in his wooden box, made to look like a present for a crossroads demon, and keeps them close. He thinks about going to see her again. He remembers the path he walked alone, still dark in early morning hours, to the highway several miles away. He keeps every tree, every rock, as a marker in his memory, just in case.

He doesn’t go to her, and her voice becomes some kind of phantom. She seems so perfect to him now that he must have dreamt her, and he’s afraid to lose it.

Then it’s September, more than a year after staying with Jess, when the letter isn’t a letter but a large stuffed envelope. Just more photos, but this time they are of Sam. Every picture she took of him, they are all included in the packet. She showed him some of them, he found most of the others, but there are still a couple that surprise him, including one that most have been taken within the first day she rescued him.

Sam feels uneasy with them. He doesn’t want them. Wants to send them back, but something stalls him. It’s a day later when he realizes the envelope doesn’t have the return address on it.

Swallowing down guilt, Sam thinks he should have been writing her back. He never even thought about it; he knows Jess doesn’t expect anything in return. His unease curdles into a low-grade panic in days to come, thinking that Jess might not write again and thinking that she wouldn’t have posted these particular pictures for no reason.

He circles St. Louis for a while; he only waits a couple of weeks before he leaves, even though she never writes that frequently. He feels something shifting right down to his very bones.

Even though it’s a two-day drive, he waits another five before he gets the courage to walk to her house. It’s autumn, so the ground is stacked with fallen leaves several inches high. His approach then isn’t quiet, so when he sees her from the back, blonde hair tied back, her frame hugged in a thick blanket, sitting out in the last bit of sun, he waits for her to turn.

She doesn’t, so he calls her name softly, waiting to hear her voice. She remains faced the same way, but she sways to his voice. When he gets a look at her face, he sucks in a breath and holds it.

Her skin is too pale for summer having just gone by. She’s lost weight, an unhealthy amount. Her hair has lost its shine, dark circles under her eyes. She looks past him for a moment longer, then she’s crying.

The woman Sam has been imagining as his personal angel is crying. That’s when everything shifts into place, and he picks her up carefully and carries her inside.

“I’m going to stay now, and help you.”

Putting her to bed means passing the trash bin standing by its side, and the pill bottles predominately taking over the decorating. It means he has to examine her, taking in the open sores on her arms where new scars are doomed to bloom. He finds almost nothing for food stores, so he makes the quickest supply run in personal history, but even the soup he gives her doesn’t stay down. The very water makes her stomach turn.

He researches the drug names; all the bottles are empty now. They all run along similar lines, and Sam curses. He walks into her room and sits quietly on the edge of the bed. She’s curled into a ball, shaking every so often. He reaches for her, carefully running a hand through her hair, untangling it.

“I think it’s time to go.”

She doesn’t disagree.

Packing a few things for her, Sam ignores the box of cameras with a layer of dust sitting on it already. There are more envelopes stuffed full of photos. Nothing is marked, edges poking out with messily. He packs them too.

He carries her to his abandoned parked car; her arms feel light around his neck, her breath barely registering on his skin. Before he settles her in, he kisses her. Her voice is raspy and her spark gone, but he remembers them so fiercely now, doesn’t want to forget for the sake of making her better. When they part and she smiles at him, she’s almost the same.

“This isn’t the first time?” He asks in the car, even though he knows the answer. She’s turned into him, tucked right into his chest, straying from the sunlight that gives her headaches. She doesn’t watch their descent into the city, her eyes and fingers tracing the scar on his arm.

Sam never stays far from her; he watches them settle her into a bed and go through tests. The bed is next to a large window, and he makes sure to keep flowers there for her.

The doctors have her medical files transferred. Sam hears the only details from them rather than her; she had the first onset of illness at age thirteen, and she underwent treatment for over a year before she tested clear of it.

“I promised myself I wouldn’t go through it ever again. If it came back, I’d leave myself alone with it.”

Sam already has her hand in his, so he pulls it to his mouth.

“You’ve been alone long enough.”

He stays.


End file.
